Alex Palmer - Blood Redemption

She was standing in the orbit of his voice and several other people close to her had smiled. Jeffo was giving voice to certain exclusions that had rankled badly with some. Toby Harrigan’s relationship with the Firewall, all that side of the investigation, had been siphoned off to a small team working to Louise, with instructions to talk to no one other than Harrigan concerning anything they found. Grace had heard the sour rumblings of gossip. How the boss was favouring a burnt-out alcoholic, compromising the possibility of their results. A whispered heresy — ‘Harrigan’s losing it, he should take himself off the job’ -

had started to do the rounds.

‘I’m going to ask each of you to exercise your mind on those questions,’ Harrigan said, looking around at them all, speaking with an acerbic edge that implied he had picked up on the undercurrents.

‘Every one of you, because there are no answers yet and it’s time we had some. But right now we’ve got a picture of her, Grace tells me.

Why don’t you show us?’

‘A picture of sorts,’ Grace replied, taking the photograph out of her file and walking forward. ‘This came out of Greg Smith’s file at Juvenile Justice. It’s a magazine photograph published about a year ago when someone was doing an expose on what happens to state wards. It’s too bad their research didn’t go much past this picture.’

There was limited space left on the board, occupied as it was by the Firewall’s website. Searching for room, Grace found herself looking at Toby Harrigan in his wheelchair, the photograph that welcomed viewers once they had surfed into his website. No other pictures of Harrigan’s son had made it to the board, he had not allowed it. His son existed there only as part of the Firewall’s ferocious world.

Harrigan, standing close by, saw it at the same moment that she did.

They glanced at each other but neither reacted. Harrigan, turning, searched through the assembled team until he located Jeffo and eyeballed him. The man looked away at once.

‘Matthew Liu is certain this is her. He was sure from the moment I showed it to him and I believe him,’ Grace said, taking the only available space, next to Harrigan’s son. ‘She’s the right height, 156

centimetres. Tiny, in other words. She’s thin and she could get into the clothes the shooter wore. You put her beside the website and there are similarities with the Firewall as well. It’s not much to go on, but it is something to connect her to Greg Smith.’

‘That’s useful, isn’t it?’ Jeffo said, this time meaning to be heard.

‘We can all go round checking the backs of people’s heads.’

There was some laughter. Grace did not waste her time even glancing in Jeffo’s direction.

‘I look forward to you doing better, mate,’ Harrigan snapped, with just enough venom to make sure everyone knew what his feelings towards Jeffo were. He spoke to Trevor, ‘It’s enough for a description.

Get it written up and get it circulated, the photo as well. Yeah, what is it, Dea?’

His administrative assistant, a small and tough-looking woman with dyed blonde hair, had appeared in the doorway.

‘Marvin’s on the phone again,’ she announced.

Oh joy, Harrigan thought irritably. He nodded to Trevor to take over and left the room. Trevor was cynically cheerful as he handed out the jobs for the day.

‘You finally get to go and chat up young Greggie this arvo, Gracie.

The shrink says it’s okay. They’re expecting you at three thirty,’ he said to her. ‘Tough luck, mate. It’s a dirty job but someone’s got to do it.’

‘I’ll cope,’ she said, faking a blithe indifference.

Dirty jobs done dirt cheap a speciality, Trev, Grace improvised from a well-known song, reflecting on her present conditions of employment.

It surprised Grace to find that Toby Harrigan was still on the board when she came in after a brief lunch, presumably because Harrigan had been locked in his office since the meeting, kept there by constant demands from the Tooth. She looked at the boy and thought that he had Harrigan’s face, twenty or so years back. Harrigan was not the only one with someone he loved in a wheelchair, she had someone there herself. Someone who was both a one-time lover and a friend, who found himself confined to the same means of transportation by fate, bad luck, call it what you like, a disease in the genes he had grown into without knowing it. Grace thought of the clock running backwards for her friend as his nerve strings were cut one by one, bringing him to a common meeting point with Harrigan’s son.

At the age of not quite thirty, Grace had acquired a lasting sense of uncertainty, she lived every day with the anticipation of insecurity. At any time, something might happen that would blow you out of the water and you would never know it. In her imaginings, the Bondi Pavilion could easily have doubled as the deserted cantina from some spaghetti western where the roofs were open to the skies, drifts of sand massed in the corners of deserted rooms and bird shit painted the walls. One day, those same white walls might crumble into the sea, leaving behind broken archways in silhouette against a hot blue Sydney sky. Wistful dreams compared to the visions on the Firewall’s website, imaginings of annihilation which reduced Grace’s own to a production which (she had to admit) was strictly amateur night.

She stopped to look at the Firewall and Toby Harrigan in their imagined embrace in the hallway of what looked like a prison, a space which gave the impression of airlessness. Briefly, she touched the two figures. You can’t see her but you love her. She knows who you are and she loves you. You’re both down there together in her eyes. That’s why she wants to get you to your feet and save you. Save you and save herself.

‘Who do you love?’ Grace sang softly to herself.

‘Are you curious about my boy, Grace? Do you want to know something about him? I can give you all the textbooks you like. They have open days where he lives if you’re interested. Come along and have a look one day, you don’t have to be shy.’

Harrigan appeared beside her and removed the photograph of his son from the board, sliding it into a folder.

‘No, that’s not why I’m here,’ she said at once. ‘I came in here to think, it’s the only place where it’s quiet enough to. He looks like you, that’s all that was in my head.’

He shrugged, apparently embarrassed by what he had said. There were lines of strain around his eyes.

‘Yeah, you could say that. Same face if you like. Poor kid.’

He spoke more quietly.

‘I was really thinking about her,’ she said, changing the subject, glancing at the anonymous figure in the photograph. ‘I’m trying to work her out. She didn’t go out looking for blood. She wasn’t doing it for kicks.’

‘I almost wish she had been, I’d find her easier to understand. I don’t cotton on to killing people for fantasies like this.’

‘This is so extreme, I almost don’t know where to start with it,’

Grace said, glancing along the board. ‘You look at it and there are no holds barred at all. Where do you have to come from to see the world this way?’

‘Nowhere we want to go. I don’t care what makes her what she is, Grace. I want her off the streets before she does something to someone else. You put a gun in the hands of someone who thinks like this and they will use it, it goes with the territory. Why are you asking yourself that question?’

‘It’s one way of getting her off the streets, isn’t it? Working out who she is, what she might do next.’

He glanced along the corkboard. ‘You look at this and you say to yourself, this is who she is,’ he said. ‘And the answer is, so what? Some people have no problem killing, they like to do it for fun or profit.